There are 2 two teams with an equal number of players.
Each player is given a club with a sharp hook on the end of it. This is used to hook the headball or hit it forward. It can also be used on the opposing team members.
The object is to get the headball into opposing team’s goal, which is a hole in the wall on the opposite side of the field.
Needless violence is encouraged but everyone must obey the referee’s trumpet, stopping or starting immediately.
The first team to 10 wins and the losers are escorted to the temple where they will be sacrificed to the gods; their heads to become new headballs.
How as a DM, would you play this out? Would you just abstract it? Would you put miniatures on a table and literally have each player move his? Or invent some kind of dice game for it (if so what)?
Playing it out with miniatures would likely take forever…some groups might enjoy it, but I know that most of the players in my games would be ready to strangle me after about a half-hour of it.
I’d do it somewhat abstractly, probably with skills. Figure out which skills could be useful in the game of headball, as well as some supplemental skills which could also be helpful (since your party’s wizard isn’t likely to have any of the obvious physical skills).
I probably wouldn’t try to play out the entire match “verbatim”…getting to 10 goals could, again, take a very long time.
Assuming you are doing this inside of an existing campaign, then you have several considerations.
First, how much time do you want this to take? Is the game the focus of an entire session?
Second, how do you give all of the players a chance to be part of the action? The consequences of losing are dire; as a player, I want to feel like I’m making a real contribution to avoiding those consequences.
Third, what base rules system are you working with? How does it model contested actions?
If I were going to do this in my current 4E campaign, I’d handle it like this.
This should be a full game session, with the challenge thrown down at the beginning of the night and the consequences (losers being marched off to the temple) at the end of the night. If the PCs lose, the next session will be very interesting indeed. In game time, this is probably a day, a night (to let the party start fully rested) and the game at the start of day 2.
To give everyone a chance to be part of the action, I’d have a setup phase with role-playing opportunities, as the party learns the rules, finds out something about their opponents, and gets a chance to set up sneaky stuff in advance (burying weapons on the playing field and the like).
The game itself I’d model using the skills contest framework, with the party needing 10 successes before it gets 10 losses (representing opponent goals). Players could use skills or powers (since the rules allow dirty tricks) for the contest.
Why is the referee’s trumpet in the rules? What game narrative purpose does it serve?
I don’t think I would want it to last more than an hour, real time.
The problem I see for minis, is figuring out how fast the ball moves compared to the players and how far it should travel when hit. Also, determining how well it was struck.
Brainiac4, the trumpet is so that they can restart the game, civilly, after a goal.
I haven’t DMed for a long time, so take my comments with the proverbial grain.
Seems like a great opportunity for a player to lose a beloved PC to what has the potential be a poorly fleshed out concept…were I organizing it, I would probably make sure that my party is assured a win, while not letting them know that to keep the suspense/fun at a high level.
Or figure out a deus ex machina to save them from their doom, should it turn out they just really, really suck at headball.
If you want it to take less than an hour and you want to simulate it, I advise setting the target lower than 10 goals - 3 goals would be more the right level.
If you want to stick with 10 goals, then abstracting it as a skills contest or something like that is probably best.
If there MUST be a sport sim in a D&D game, this might be the way to go. But really, if I want to play a sport sim, I’ll play a sport sim. When I’m in a D&D game, I want to game. If the DM sprang this on a group I was in, I’d probably go along with it once, but only once, even if it was done abstractly. Unless there was some pressing need to have the game in the plot, I’d tell the DM to let me know when there was an actual D&D game going on, and find something else to do.
If all of your players want to play this sport sim in their D&D game, then it might be fun for them. But if even one player hates sports as much as I do, then it’s not going to be fun, unless you provide entertainment for the player(s) who don’t want to play the sport.
I mean, you don’t play out everything that the group does, do you? Gathering food and finding a place to potty and all that? Do you haggle about every ordinary purchase of things like rope and ten foot poles and clothing? Haggling over a one-time purchase or sale of a high level magic item is one thing, but haggling over the night’s lodging and meals is boring. Gaming should be a good mix of realism and fun. If realism makes the game seriously not fun, then dump the realism.
You can probably just dump the adventure hook in another, more interesting way.